Trying to edit several moderately complex user controls in design or split view that displayed fine in VS 2005 I find the new VS 2008 Web editor to be unbearingly slow. Switching from markup to design view takes up to almost a minute (one control) on the first try or hangs VS 2008 altogether (another one). If the control is displayed it can take up to 3-5 s. to switch between two textboxes while trying to edit a FormView's item templates and even on a new control with only a few elements in it the editor is far from feeling snappy. Altogether the whole feel of the new Web editor is extremely unresponsive for me and doing no matter what is painful.

Is there some way to speed it up by switching off some thing or another ?

The machines I tried it one are both laptops. One is a Intel Core 2 Duo with 2.16 Ghz and 2 GB RAM running Vista Ultimate 32bit, the other one a Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2 Ghz with 2 GB RAM running XP SP2.

Best regards,

Chandra 

Did you have any pre-release .NET framework or VS installed on the machine?

Yes, I had the Beta 2 of VS 2008 and .net 3.5 installed on the Vista machine, but not on the XP one, but deinstalled them before installing the RTM. Indeed the hang on loading one of the user controls only occurs on the Vista machine, but both are slow. The sluggishness only affects the design and split views, source view is fine. Both controls' HTML makes heavy use of HTML tables.

Another thing, don't know if this might be related:

On the machine were I can open my user control, the control is rendered ridiculously wide by the design view. The width of its main table should be 520px, but it is rendered with something around >2500px. I haven't found out yet what is causing this (while I only tried cursorily some things as it is getting late over here), but the file renders fine on IE 7, Firefox and in VS 2005's design view.

Also if I create a new user control and randomly add some controls, the design view, while feeling a little bit slower than VS 2005, performs more or less as expected. Apparently it seems to have some dislike of complex table structures (I know HTML table orgies are somewhat obsolete, but old bad habits die slow, also we still have a lot of customers using antique browsers *sigh*).

I'd like to isolate if issue is with assembly versions conflict or is it really in the designer. Can you copy complete table into a plain standalone HTML file and try view switching? Never mind if server controls failed to create - we only want to check if table is the issue.

I notice the same thing too.  I have vs 2005 also installed in the same machine.  Could that be the reason?

 I now tried the following: As requested I added a HTML page to my project and copied the entire table structure into it. Switching is now fast and the table structure renders fine in the correct width, while the tables themselves are certainly empty as the references to all the asp:* controls are missing.

Then I got something really peculiar: I found out that if I scroll a little bit around in my user control's markup view and/or click here and there (indeed one click into the markup view or just letting the error list slide up seems to be enough to make it work), I can switch to designer view just fine. Performance still is lacking and it still has the width problem, but no hang. If I switch to designer view immediately after opening the file, I get the already known hang (the design view stays empty, the VS 2008 interface stops responding completely, until I quit it via Task Manager). This seems to be fully reproducable on my Vista machine.

 I'm having almost the same problem with a few differences:

• It always hangs for me when I try to switch to design view--it's never just slow.
• It hangs even for html pages.
• It hangs even when I haven't added any controls or tags yet.
• The work-around wudbaer described doesn't work for me.
• Visual Studio itself doesn't become unresponsive, just the tab I tried to switch to the design view in.  I can switch to other tabs and work in them (in source view) and even close the offending tab and reopen the file.
  
• I also have Visual Studio 2003 and 2005 installed on my machine, but I've never run any pre-release versions of any of the Visual Studios or frameworks.

Another data point: The hangs apparently are no hangs, but the switch is just really really really slow: I tried the switch again before leaving for lunch and got the already known hang. When I got back after more than an hour, my control had been rendered in the design view and everything was fine apart from the performance issues.

This is a different issue, this happens when designer is not installed properly. Close VS, go to Control Panel and make sure Microsoft Web Authoring Component appears there. If it does, uninstall it. Then go to the DVD, locate WCU\WebToolsCore folder and run WebToolsCore.exe from en-us folder. Setup does not have UI, give it about 10 minutes to complete.

Interesting - that's for reporting this. We'll try to repro locally. Perhaps there is a thread synchronization issue and types needed by designer are not available yet when you are trying to switch fast.

Having the very same problem here with hangs, as does my colleagues. We are not happy with VS2008 as it slows us down,
and therefore we prefer working with VS2005. What a crappy unstable release with these hangs and crashes.

 Computers are not the problem because they are C2DUO, 2gb ram, 200gb HD.

We have VS2003, 2005, 2008 installed, never installed any Beta's on our machines.

If you have VS 2005 installed, can you obtain a hang dump as described here: http://blogs.msdn.com/mikhailarkhipov/archive/2007/09/19/how-to-obtain-debug-information-from-a-hung-frozen-application.aspx ? You may want to switch to General Development profile to see the Save Dump command. Please e-mail it to me at mikhaila-at-microsoft-dot-com

 Will the method to create a crash dump also work with my hang situation as described above ? I'm not sure that any exception is generated in that case.

Apart from that, the biggest problem I am currently having with VS 2008 is the fact that at least for me any addition of even a small HTML table to a page's markup slows the Visual Web Editor to a crawl and makes any work with it  in the best case an extremely unpleasant experience and in the worse case more or less impossible. For that reason I'll stay on VS 2005 at least for ASP.Net projects for the time being, which really is a pity, as the new Web Editor is for me one of the main selling points for VS 2008, and from the glimpses I got when it works more or less correctly it really will be a major improvement over VS 2005 once the performance and stability issues will be worked out.